


We Hit the Road Running

by thescyfychannel



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, M/M, Multi, Referenced Canon-Typical Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-10
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-07-10 19:21:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15955862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescyfychannel/pseuds/thescyfychannel
Summary: for the first time in a long damn time, you're starting to feel something strangely akin to hope.





	We Hit the Road Running

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BagtheBagisnotaBag](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BagtheBagisnotaBag/gifts).



> Congratulations to our giveaway winner, BagtheBagisnotaBag! We combined a couple of your previous requests...
> 
> "2. In a world where the games never existed, just before conscription and his inevitable culling, Karkat meets a cult bearing his sign."
> 
> "'Adult trolls are at their most emotionally stable when they have all their quadrants filled. Their lives need to be balanced to be healthy and that cant be achieved alone. But Sollux can't seem to keep two of his shipmates in separate quadrants. When he flips red he flips red for both of them.' Drama! Comedy! Romance! action? mystery?"

"You can always stay with me."

The first thing you know about conscription is that you plan to run as soon as it happens. The second thing you know is that two dumbfuck idiots, one of whom is a heaping of trouble all his own and the other of whom is  _in_  a heaping of trouble all on his own, have both offered you a place to stay. It's been a good few sweeps (three sweeps, two perigees, six nights, and four hours) since Eridan Ampora and Sollux Captor and all the rest of those absolute idiots you call friends discovered the truth of your blood color, but you're no more likely to bring the entire hellscape of the Alternian Empire down on your heads now than you were then.

You delete both of their messages, you shove your palmhusk back into your bag, you stuff your bag into your sylladex. One glance around your ransacked hive tells you that you've grabbed everything of value, sentimental and otherwise, and everything else that you could possibly need. Your lusus has been set loose; you've absolutely fucking destroyed the rest of your hive with your sickles.

It's time to go.

 

* * *

 

The trek out through your little town isn't as bad as it could be. You don't have a ton of neighbors still hanging around here, and deciding to leave two hours after dawn has ensured that the rest of them won't be around. Because you're paranoid, you'd memorized schedules, checked for hidden cameras, and a dozen other things (which might have been what first alerted Sollux to your current dilemma) and borrowed money from Eridan for a daycloak (which definitely let him know that something was up, given your adamant refusal to accept a brand new one that cost more than your sweeply allowance as a present four sweeps ago).

You still find yourself breathing a sigh of relief as you hit the edge of the forest. When you'd left town, you'd made sure to stay inside the massive tracks your lusus and a few others had made, to help reinforce the "slaughters by wild beasts or some angry highblood" theory. Now that you're in the forest, where trolls come and go all the time, you're free to move around a little bit more, and you intend to take full advantage.

 

A good few hours find you in the middle of the forest and grateful for the shade as the sun burns overhead. It takes you another half hour to find the stream you'd marked on your map two weeks ago, but once you're there, you decide that it was well worth the extra time. Food first. Then you'll check the annoying notifications your sylladex has been giving you for the past...you'd stopped counting. You don't want to think about it, or about where the majority of those messages are probably coming from.

Unfortunately, someone disagrees with that plan of action.

 

When you open up your sylladex, instead of the backpack you'd reached for, your palmhusk— _which had been inside it, note to fucking self_ —drops into your hands. Tossing it back in and going for the backpack gives you the same result five times, before you finally give up. You know of only one guy good enough to hack a sylladex like that, and you halfway consider purging everything he's ever given you in an attempt to get rid of whatever hack he's laid on your sylladex that lets him pull shit like this.

Nothing for it, then.

You open your palmhusk up and drop down beneath a tree with the backpack you've managed to acquire now that you're playing by Captor's stupid rules. It has been sweeps since you mastered the art of scrolling through a palmhusk one-handed, while also shoveling food into your face, but the shaking in your hands as you tap the message icon makes it just a little bit harder.

As always, they completely fail to disappoint.

 

chatlog with twinArmageddons

[ok iif you're afraiid of catchiing my cootiie2 that bad ii can throw 2ome 2opor patche2 on the futon and we can paiint each other2 claw2 and call iit a day.]

[KK.]

[karkat.]

[karkat vanta2.]

[are you kiiddiing me riight now lol an2wer your mobiile deviice before ii braiid your 2ylladex'2 chutehaiir iintwo a harne22 and riide iit liike a pony.]

[ii know you're gettiing the2e.]

[dude.]

[fuck.]

[fiine get ready two get majorly dunked on liike ii'm troll kobe wiith three puck2 left iin the quarter and there'2 ten 2econd2 on the buzzer.]

[a22hole.]

 

chatlog with caligulasAquarium

[for all you knoww i could be beached on some random iceberg like a cholerbear in an imperial geographic feed]

[troll davvid attenborough is really milkin my imminent demise kar his dumb olivve accent is merciless to my plight]

[theyll find my corpse out here but at least the narration an orchestral score wwill givve the series good ratins]

[you knoww the last feww eps wwere admittedly a little wweak ivve gotten better wwith a gopro an a carcass on my back]

 

Idiots. You're dealing with complete and utter idiots.

 

Once you finish your brief meal and refill your liquid canister, you settle on placating the both of them with a quick reply.

 

[I'M BUSY, FUCK OFF.]

 

Then you pack up shop and set off again.

 

* * *

 

Two hours later, your sylladex has moved from pop-up notifications of increasingly filthy insults to spitting random objects at your head, and you drop down onto the forest floor with a scowl and a rant, all ready to go.

 

chatlog with twinArmageddons

[hey buddy fuck you.]

[THAT WASN'T A FUCKING TRAINING SICKLE, CAPTOR!!! YOUR MALICIOUS ATTACK ON MY PERSONAL PROPERTY HAS GONE FROM MILDLY ANNOYING TO POTENTIALLY MURDEROUS, AND I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK TO YOUR FUCKING MANAGER.]

[OH WAIT! YOU DON'T HAVE ONE! YOU'RE A ONE-MAN COMPANY OF ANNOYANCE AND SPITE AND YOU WILL RUE THE DAY YOU DECIDED TO DESCEND THIS SYLLADEX-BASED HELL DOWN UPON MY HEAD.]

[NOW FIX MY GODSDAMN SHIT, CAPTOR, OR I SWEAR BY THE HANDMAID'S MOST GLORIOUS TITS THAT I WILL FUCKING END YOU.]

 

Your mess kit shoots out of the sylladex and thwacks you upside the head. To add insult to injury, the little string catches on your horn, leaving the entire bag slapping less than gently against your cheek in the breeze.

 

chatlog with twinArmageddons

[I'M BLOCKING YOU.]

 

You are, as ever, a glutton for punishment, so you tap on the "Three Unread Messages" notification next to Ampora's name and brace yourself for the worst.

 

chatlog with caligulasAquarium

[bull shit kar a marathon of six romantically entangled midbloods livvin in a hivvestem dont constitute busy wwevve had this convversation]

[on top a that i knoww youvve texted me busy before]

[come on man just be straight wwith me i can take it]

 

This is, of course, more than you can take. Ampora never  _means_  to hit low, but that doesn't mean his sad puppy act doesn't hit low nonetheless. Gods, this fucking sucks. You take a minute to compose your self, maybe swipe at your eyes a little to clear the dust and dirt away, and tap out another reply.

 

chatlog with caligulasAquarium

[I'M NOT DRAGGING YOU INTO MY STUPIDITY ANY MORE THAN I ALREADY HAVE. IT WAS A MISTAKE TO LET IT GO THIS FAR, AND I DON'T INTEND TO REPEAT THAT.]

[YOU AND CAPTOR DESERVE BETTER THAN THIS SHIT.]

[TAKE CARE OF EACH OTHER AND STAY SAFE, OR SOMETHING.]

 

Then you grip your husktablet in both hands and snap it in half before it fully finishes its cheerful little "new message!" update noise.

You should've done this sooner. You stupid fucking idiot.

 

* * *

 

The next several hours stretch into the next several nights. You hike without thinking, without clear destination, without any kind of drive other than the sort that sends you slogging through copious amounts of terrain for the most stupid of reasons.

Captor and Ampora had given you a brief reprieve, which makes you think that they'd been sharing messages all along. Bastards.

On the second night of their silence, though, you're hit in the head with a notebook you don't recognize as belonging to you. Further inspection—you lift it off the ground to scowl at it properly—reveals a sign inscribed on the front, in a violet so deep it could easily pass for black.

When you open the notebook, though, it's from both of them, and they're being stupid again. Really stupid. Stupid enough to write long, sentimental letters, thoughts, random ideas—all sorts of shit that has you checking the air for dust once more. It's the little rambles that get you, that they actually sat down and thought of something they wanted to say to you, then got lost in the saying of it.

You hole up in a tree, and keep reading. There's enough material to last you for a long damn while, and you don't want to send the book back yet, so instead, you find some nice leaves and a marker and draw quadrant symbols everywhere.

 

The next time you check your sylladex, after awaking from an impromptu doze (that you really, really needed) with the book still in your lap, the leaves are all gone.

 

By the fifth night of alternating between trudging and reading, you're nearing the end. You've left them...updates, of a sort. More leaves. Pictures sometimes, but usually just the basics. No words. You don't trust yourself to write actual words, and you're reasonably sure you don't have the space for them anyway.

It takes you five nights to reach the end, and another break halfway through the sixth to actually discover what they'd obviously meant for you to find: a map. It's a fucking map.

Somehow, some way, Sollux and Eridan had charted your projected course, extraordinarily well, or they'd tracked you, somehow, and set up a godsdamn self-updating map. You unfolded it completely, and laid it out on the forest floor. Where there was a map or a guide, from those two losers, there was almost certainly a destination or a point.

You find both.

 

You want to be mad. You really,  _really_  want to be mad.

 

But for the first time in a long damn time, you're starting to feel something strangely akin to hope.

 

* * *

 

When you take up their stupid little  _quest_ , you follow their instructions religiously. It's not just a straightforward "follow the trail, find the X" type map that you've seen Serket use for some of her games. There are actual checkpoints to pass through, actual places marked in screaming red Alternian: AVOID AT ALL COST.

They wouldn't gamble with your life, so  _you_  don't take any chances.

 

And as time passes—of  _course_  you would be going off the fucking course, of  _course_  their map would take you in a stupid long route—you slowly begin to see a pattern. The AVOID AT ALL COSTs become fewer. The checkpoints become more frequent, and the snippets of conversation you hear at them get...more rebellious. Some might even dare to call them  _treasonous_ , in the extreme.

And your sign gets more and more prevalent.

 

You'd left off wearing it when you first fled, out of a desire to distance yourself from your own identity, to make yourself harder to find. If you were being honest, which you'd been forced, increasingly, to be, well. You'd say that you wanted some space from  _yourself_. From the fuckups and mistakes and general realization that nothing ever got better for mutants. From all the bullshit that seemed to hang over your existence like a massive, depressing, hemoanonymous cloud.

You had a feeling that maybe, just maybe, both Eridan and Sollux  _got_  it, but even if they were trying out some convoluted scheme to get you to love yourself again, that wouldn't explain the sudden influx of your sign. Not unless some of the stories, some of the whispers, some of the fuckshit people had said to you over the years...

Not unless it was true.

 

Even if it was, though, it was of absolutely no use to  _you_. Revealing yourself, revealing your mutated blood color, the only thing it would do was bring more pain down on your head.

Only. Only.

 

The further along you got, the more... _tempting_ , it got. It was evident to any troll with eyes that most of these trolls were the sort who weren't exactly favored by the Empire, for whatever reasons. Mutations, injuries, hell, even having enough  _decency_   to be considered useless for the brutality that the Empire prized.

It made you wonder, if nothing else.

 

* * *

 

The breaking point comes with the turning seasons.

 

You're invited to stay longer, to spend days or nights in one place, depending on the weather, depending on what's going on, depending on how much food and space they have available. You've  _noticed_ , slowly, that a lot of them seem to, for lack of a better word,  _know_  you.

Your first assumption is that word was passed along from previous settlements, up and down these chains and links, and you're informed that you're not  _wrong_ , but you're also informed that it's a bit more complicated than that, that they're really sorry, that they'd love to tell you more, if only they could—

This aggravates you, but you remain as calm as you possibly can and carry on. You're  _promised_ , promised  _repeatedly_ , even, that you'll get an explanation at the end of your journey. So you keep moving, from checkpoint to checkpoint, and try to  _not_  lose your shit as Ampora's replies and Captor's answers get cagier and cagier, the deeper you pry.

 

When someone greets you by name, you nearly run them through with a sickle, out of sheer panic—but the blue dodges, laughs, and informs you, overtop your repeated apologies, that a warning was passed down about your potential reactions. "Besides! A little friendly attempted bloodshed between comrades is nothing!"

You're glad to get out of there. You think. Because what the blue said, about the warning being passed  _down..._ it implies that someone higher up in the ranks of the organization knows you, knows you well enough to make that kind of call.

And you're not sure how you feel about that.

 

* * *

 

Some nights, as you walk, or sit in the back of a transport you've been permitted to board, you wonder. Is it Sollux? He's brilliant, anyone without a major pan fracture could see it. Is it Eridan? He's a seadweller, after all, and he was reared to command as much as he was hatched to it.

But then you discard these notions: Sollux has problems of his own, right about now, and Eridan, well. If it's an organization that's as excited to see you as it seems to be, it might  _not_  be so friendly to seadwellers.

No, you're fairly certain that your idiots found some heretofore unnoticed pocket of resistance and enlisted you into it. Without your permission. Jackasses.

 

* * *

 

Then a full quarter sweep after you began this fool's quest, you walk into the main base of whatever the fuck this is.

 

Your symbol hangs everywhere. Statues of someone—someone who looks an  _awful_  lot like you, only, older, scruffier, and a good deal more  _tired_  (which is honestly  _impressive_ )—are everywhere. When you walk in, an old pack slung over one shoulder, a hush falls over the crowd.

And one by one, everyone in the room sinks to their knees.

You're ten seconds from screaming for an explanation, or throwing up, or pitching a fucking  _fit_ , when you realize that "everyone" wasn't quite so accurate a descriptor.

 

In the center of the room and rapidly approaching, stand the two idiots you've missed the most. Sollux is smirking, Eridan looks  _relieved_ , and you completely forget yourself, dropping your pack and sprinting across the room to throw yourself into their arms.

"Hey KK," says Sollux, one arm wrapped tight around you, gripping at your shirt, even as his tone stays flippant, only wavering at the very end. "What took you so long?"

"Fuck's sake, Captor," Eridan mutters, and buries his face in your hair as he clutches at you. "Welcome home, Kar."

For a picture perfect, right out of a romcom moment, you forget everything, and you're ready to forgive them for all the shit they've put you through.

 

* * *

 

And then you find out they've both joined a fucking  _cult_  created in the  _name of your Ancestor_ , and you decide that the three of you are going to have  _words_.

Eventually.

You've got a  _lot_  of work to do first.

**Author's Note:**

> Sollux actions + dialogue courtesy of endeofblood
> 
> Eridan actions + dialogue courtesy of auxanges


End file.
